I. Introduction
A. The expressions of love, both erotic and spiritual, differ in various cultures, ages and communities, ancient and modern, and people's ideological attitudes towards love, sexuality, and romance underwent a major shift in the Middle Ages.B. Ideology is a system of representations (discourses, images, myths) concerning the real relations in which people live. What is represented in ideology is not the system of real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real system in which they live.
C. We can trace a shift of ideology between the early Middle Ages and the High Middle Ages (before and after ca. 1050) in the literature, which evidences a polarity between the heroic/epic militaristic and the romance; in France between the chansons de geste and the chansons d'aventures..
D. The conflict of ideological codes: that of the medieval Christian Church, of medieval aristocratic society, and of chivalric courtliness.
Medieval Christianity is marked by principles of:
1. love of God and neighbor
2. spiritual and otherworldly
3. egalitarian ("neither male or female, Roman or Greek, Jew or Gentile")
4. peace
5. sexual restraint (concupiscence) and self-abnegation
6. marriage as a sacramental union through the consent of the couple, not dynastic and arranged; adultery is morally evil.
7. ecclesiastical authority over the individual in religion and ethics
Courtly Love is based on opposite principles:
1. The central idea is that love for a woman is to be prized above all other things; it has an ennobling influence on the character of the lover.
2. It is aristocratic; the lover serves his lady in a feudal relationship as vassal, servant.
3. Extramarital. True love should be given freely, not arranged; there should be no compulsion other than desire.
4. It is not necessarily mutual. In love with the idea of love, the quest was what ennobled. 5. It has to be secret, in a society in which there is little privacy. Love is too sacred and precious to be profaned by common gossip.
All this is formulated in the problematic work of Andreas Capellanus, De arte honeste amandi (De amore)., a scholastic reworking of Ovid's De arte amandi and Remedia amoris
Courtly love, unlike Christian life, was generally inaccessible to the lower classes.
1. Any exercise of courtliness demanded LEISURE and WEALTH. The time and resources necessary to woo noble ladies would only have been available to an aristocratic minority.
2. CLEANLINESS and the wearing of beautiful and well-kept CLOTHES also made it impossible for poor and working people to be courtly.
3. The necessity of being GENEROUS on a large scale made courtoisie the domain of the rich.
4. The whole CHIVALRIC CODE (the knight proving his worth and his love for the lady by his prowess in armed combat) was tailor-made for the warrior class.
5. Education brought LITERACY to the aristocracy from the clergy, so that the noble lover could compose and recite poems and songs, write letters to the lady, and read books with her.
Medieval writings demonstrate either the opposition of these ideologies or the attempted amalgamation of them. However, history and literature indicate the tensions of attempting to reconcile the opposites: e.g., in literature, Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guenevere; in history, Abelard and Eloise. We can see the conflicts in the works of Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes.